Feed Her A Cheesecake, Stat

I don't know what to say about this ad for Silver jeans.

When I first started watching the above video, I assumed that is was a public service announcement about the reality of anorexia, and then I realized that it was an ad and that these are the kinds of bodies the advertiser wants us to see in their product. The mainstreaming of a serious disorder has reached a new low.

UPDATE: Due to the comments receive so far on this post, I have decided to put my response, which is also in the comments here in the post. I was unintentionally unclear originally:

...as the comments have built up, I have become more and more uncomfortable with the general yuck reaction. I should have been more clear. There is one woman in particular that looks very ill, whereas the others appear to possibly be teenagers who haven't yet developed more mature bodies yet.

The one woman (she's pictured in the still before you play the video) is the one to which I meant to refer, and it's not because of any kind of yuck factor. She aroused a lot of sad feelings in me. It's not because I don't appreciate a long-term famine aesthetic (I don't), but because I was shocked by an advertisers willingness to use an obviously ill young woman for the body her illness created.

Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that the one woman has an eating disorder, but I cannot help but think otherwise, and whether this is the case or not, it transmits a strong message of sexiness and acceptability to a level of apparent starvation previously considered life-threatening in a culture in which so many young women suffer and sometimes die from eating disorders. It depathologizes an illness which remains a serious illness even if a clothing company sexualizes in mainstream advertising.